Your own BPD relationship map

[NCEA]

While I was in the relationship I thought she was "complex". I told her she's "a few women in one" and that I loved her for that. It was based on intuition and experience. What fed my fascination with it was the idea that she's just more interesting than other women, one of these women you read about in novels, who leave behind them confused lovers who "couldn't handle her".

Now I know it's just a sickness.

So I've complied a BPD map of the relationship, a summary of what I know from the literature filled with real life instances.

It has everything I could identify and remember as being relevant. From origins of the condition (alcoholic mother, divorced parents, sexual abuse etc etc) to mental issues (panic attacks, psychosis attack) to instances of invalidation, triangulation ("you see, for example this taxi diver, he's someone I'd date... ." LOL ... .X 100 other cases)    to the three stages of the relationship, all mirroring instances, all the love-bombing she used... .for the discard for example, it has our story and 3 others, from 3 previous exes. (all were awful - she used the opportunity to humiliate / feel powerful) . Everything is described in details, the occurrence and what it means / why it happened / it's implications etc.

It just a draft and it's already 4 pages.

[FlyingJ]

Are you doing this so you can "get it out on paper?" I wouldn't mind doing that... But then again the anger I'd get just from writing the stuff would overtake me. Plus there was so many red flags, I wouldn't even be able to remember them all. I blocked all the "small flags" out over the years, and mainly remember the big ones. Sometimes just thinking about it, I'll remember something I totally forgot about.   

[NCEA]

Yes, get it all in one place. Anger for me now is a good state actually, way better than depression, in my angry waves I'm energized.

Also at one point this list will make it's way to her. She needs to know. She's very confused as to who she is, just as I was about her, she has no idea... .I could save her years of therapy .


Then  the real challenge is making this map FOR YOURSELF... .that's the next step.

For example - I had three panic attacks in my life - all three in "life threatening situations". Twice when I was diving , once in a hot air balloon. I smoked weed just twice my whole life (no other drugs) both cases I had paranoia that most don't get from weed.

I need to be in constant control, yet I need complete freedom and these two don't really work together... .etc etc.

I want to write down all my "shi-t" too.

[thisworld]

Thank you for another interesting and eye-opening thread, NCEA. I think these allow us to think at a level of abstraction and are very helpful for our detachment. I, for one, get the chance to focus on what I think about the situation and I need this so much because my relationship was mostly built on responding to a huge continuous crisis.

I don't think my ex was complex- but every individual differs of course. I think he was very confusing but once I identified certain mechanisms, he was actually very simple and predictable. His black and white emotional repertoire was very narrow. Because I was familiar with narcs before I met him, I noticed his traits immediately. Narcs are very predictable for many reasons but to me, mostly because they have a radar in this dance for two people and they do the opposite of your true emotional expectations. Know how you would feel in a situation yourself, the narc will create something that makes you feel the opposite. You can even see when the cycle of goodness will begin.

Still, there seemed to be something less controlled, less collected, more pained than a narc and toward the end of our relationship I realized that it may be BPD (some call them failed narcs). And here I am on a website reading about other people's experiences and sadly discovering that many things I thought were unique to this individual were actually textbook symptoms revealed with very similar words, gestures, sexual positions. It's a bit like those films where, in the end, we get a chance to look at events retrospectively, bring irrelevant and confusing pieces together and discover the true plot. It's a bit eerie sometimes.

Now I see all those things as symptoms and symptoms are not complex I think. They are recognizable, identifiable. In my relationship, things widened but did not deepen. From the relationship aspect (which differs from his inner world of course) it was shallow even when it was complex. I mostly got triangulations, there isn't much complexity in a triangle. At its most complex, he badmouthed people whom he badmouthed me to but even that is not very complex, just a two-way orchestration. Sometimes his vocal desires, his words about needing and appreciating love did not match his actions, which was confusing and even paralyzing. But when I got the chance to listen to him now  (he writes long texts to me so I know more about him than I did in the relationship) I don't see complexity. To the contrary, he doesn't make sense. It doesn't have enough coherence to be complex. In my practical experience, I had a relationship full of events that were full of drama but they always revolved around the same message ("people want me".

Still, I know what you mean when you compare them to other people. Emotionally healthy people do not provide this much shock - for lack of a better word. (Some people are truly dull, maybe too mainstream for us regardless of their emotional health or lack of it) But emotionally healthy people whom I find interesting have their unique ways of reacting to things. They come up with a thousand different emotions, reactions to things. My friends are more interesting than my BPD ex. His scenario is always the same with a limited emotional palette.

This map idea reminded me of something I was thinking during our relationship. I was thinking that the things he told me (always affairs between people, no support in their friend group, always the same story (who cheated on who and who played who) resembled the first page of a Russian classic where the writer tells you who is who and it's difficult to keep all the relationships in your mind. At one point, I thought I was dating Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina at the same time. But it wasn't as complex because our relationship did not have the oppressive circumstances these people were under. I, on the other hand, started feeling like I was an anarchist living under a regime of emotional fascism. They say fascism doesn't only shut you up, it forces you to say things that it wants to hear. I identify with that in this relationship.

Your post made me think of a complex character in a novel. The first person that came to my mind was a writer, actually. Jane Austen. This little woman from centuries ago, who never traveled anywhere outside her little village and lived according to very strict codes of her parish wrote those novels about human psychology with such an observant and sometimes sarcastic attitude that what she observed still speaks to me today (films are another issue, they are nothing like the novels). I'm thinking how complex she must have been herself, how deep actually.  

As to our inner worlds, even when we don't make them as visible as disordered individuals, everybody is very complex when they get a chance to question themselves I believe. Ordinarily unhappy people on a psychoanalyst's couch come up with such incredible things. I think in Cluster B is more visibly complex at first but the inner narrative is not complex until they reach some self-awareness through therapy.    


 

[NCEA]

Amazing post. Yes, once you see the order in the chaos it's pretty simple.

BASE: Parents who didn't lover her -> feeling unworthy -> shallow emotions ->

CYCLE STARTS HERE:   -> long distance relationship to avoid intimacy -> cheating so she could use sex to be liked by other men and bond sexually as the only form of connection -> keeping them at a distance so they don't uncover the mask of emptiness and shallowness  -> using mind games to maintain control -> discard when new supply is found -> repeat.